


Another Country

by atria



Category: Tennis no Oujisama | Prince of Tennis
Genre: Ableist Language, Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-23
Updated: 2018-11-23
Packaged: 2019-08-28 03:24:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,216
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16715705
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atria/pseuds/atria
Summary: There’s an American in the tennis club. Seigaku thinks he’s a miracle. Tezuka thinks he’s a distraction from districts. AU where Tezuka isn’t a saint or a stone and Ryoma gets to teach him stuff too. They’re weird about each other anyway.





	Another Country

**Author's Note:**

> Helps to know anime canon, but this isn't a completely accurate retelling :-)

 

There’s an American in the tennis club. Four exchange students in all, one blonde, one pudgy, one black. The one in tennis club is all people will talk about between classes, in line for lunch, at reading corner in the library.

“But his family is Japanese,” Oishi says on their way to coach’s office. “Momo’s hosting him for a few months. You think he’ll be any good?”

Tezuka thinks he’s a distraction from districts.

*

First afternoon practice of the school year and all the regulars are away for a friendly except Momoshiro, who’s babysitting the preregulars as well as the exchange student. Apparently he’s slipshod. Tezuka comes back to see a short stranger brandishing a racquet at one of the brattier juniors. He makes to call Oishi to put a stop to it, but Ryuuzaki-sensei tells him to hold off.

“This could be worth a watch,” she says.

They look down at the match from the office window -- if play that one-sided can be called a match. Coach is right. The kid is good, even great. It looks like he isn’t trying terribly hard even from afar, but he’s taking Arai apart stroke by clean stroke. He’s not just skilled, he’s smart.

Sometimes he pauses before a swing, clearly saying something, and Arai’s movements get more violent if less effective. Tezuka disapproves of both: he hates a bully and a rabble-rouser.

He can’t help his interest, though. “Who’s that?”

“An old student’s son. The family moved to America years ago,” Ryuuzaki-sensei says cryptically. She looks distant, like she’s remembering.

Tezuka thinks for a moment before he puts the pieces together. He’s surprised. He thought the exchange student from America would be bigger.

Oishi lets himself into the office. “Tezuka?” he asks, expectant. “Were you watching?”

Tezuka doesn’t bother to answer an obvious question.

Oishi continues unperturbed. “He’s the exchange student I told you about. Do you think he’s worth putting in the ranking matches?” We could use everyone we can get, he doesn’t say.

Tezuka taps his pencil on the sheet of paper before him. “Give all of them 30 laps. No one gets to break the rules here.”

If Oishi’s smile is indulgent, Tezuka doesn’t see it.

*

Oishi makes introductions after practice. The boy’s name is Echizen. His given name is unimportant.

“Buchou,” Echizen says, his accent flawless. His cap tilts to hide his face when he bows, half-mocking. He doesn’t look like he eats French fries or milkshakes or anything at all.

If Tezuka did an exchange program, he’d go somewhere he would at least learn something.

*

After dinner, father reads the business news.

“Shame about this trade deal nonsense,” he says. “Japan’s good at TVs, cars, computers. We should stick to what we’re good at.”

“Kunimitsu likes tennis,” mother says. Her expression is mild as milk.

“Kunimitsu’s good at science.” His father’s hand goes to his hair, though he has had to reach up to do it since ninth grade. “Work hard and you might make it to Tokyo University.”

*

The week’s practice matches are full of nervous energy. Districts are coming up, and so are ranking matches. Echizen is taking an above-average junior apart on court C. He uses his right hand -- Tezuka suspects it’s not his better one -- and looks vaguely bored.

Across the court, Momo calls for him to gambatte, ochibi! It’s hardly necessary: the score is 3-0 ten minutes in, and Echizen is closing in on the last point.

Momo seems attached already to the quiet surly kid. It doesn’t seem like a particularly smart thing to do. These exchange students up and leave when their three months run out, and no one hears much from them after. Usually it’d be none of Tezuka’s business, but this is his team. He frowns at the wire fence.

“Interested?” Ryuuzaki-sensei asks wryly at his ear. Tezuka tries to hide his surprise. He didn’t hear her walk up.

“Hardly,” he says. She makes a disbelieving noise. She sounds as though she knows he stayed up past midnight rewriting the whole of the ranking roster but left one spot blank.

At home that night, Tezuka swallows his pride and searches the entrance requirements for the JTA high school championships. Nothing about citizenship, just “current enrollment in an approved Japanese junior high school”.

Fine, he thinks. He copies the last name onto the roster, slips his glasses onto the nightstand and shuts his eyes.

Tezuka falls asleep thinking that this year, they can do this.

*

Echizen creams Kaidoh. Inui’s off the team. Tezuka takes his matches with distressing ease, leaves Kikumaru with a sharp word or two and makes it in time for most of Echizen’s game.

There’s a glint in his eye when he’s backed into a corner. If he was cocky and half-bored with his opponents before, he delights in the strength of a real challenger and his own depthless gift. He looks fearless, like he doesn’t know what loss is.

Tezuka feels it like a finger at his neck. It’s a specific feeling he knows only from sensing it in himself.

After, Echizen’s skinny face flushes with triumph and health. The red in his cheeks makes his bones sharper, his face one slim honed muscle like the rest of him. Tezuka watches him sharply for signs of gloating but he seems calm enough, probably finds his latest conquests mada mada dane, Tezuka supposes. The thought annoys him less than it should.

Even though the flashy moves Echizen plays are copied, a couple seasons out of date, he’s irrepressible. He’s something else. Tezuka sees the rest of the team take him in and assimilate it into their idea of how things will be.

Good. They can’t afford to get complacent.

*

All the way to the districts, Tezuka tries not to roll his shoulder where coach or Oishi can see.

*

Fudomine is a no-name school, but the captain’s name looks familiar. Inui says he doesn’t have files on him.

Tezuka hesitates, then scratches out the name in reserves and plays Echizen in singles two.

*

Momoshiro and Echizen make a song-and-dance of Gyokurin. Tezuka feels a headache forming and lets coach ream them out. He takes it as payback for thinking Echizen didn’t act like fourteen.

The fun and games stop with Fudomine. They’re good, maybe Nationals good. Tezuka planned for one of the doubles sets to fall through, but he still feels the sting of disappointment when Fuji catches Kawamura’s swollen wrist and gestures to the umpire.

Later, Fuji doesn’t apologise to Tezuka and Tezuka doesn’t expect him to. Seigaku isn’t the kind of team where people are made to play past what they can take, physically or mentally. Tezuka believes in that about as much as he believes in anything.

It’s no use thinking about what he would’ve done in the same place.

They hold on by their teeth for two more matches. Tezuka congratulates his players, cataloguing errors and improvements only mutely. No use getting impatient. It’s what went wrong last year.

His left foot taps the floor when Echizen’s game is announced.

“Nervous?” Fuji asks. His gaze is very canny.

No, Tezuka lets his glare say. And you’re not my older brother. He makes his foot go still.

Fuji smiles as the umpire calls Echizen to serve. Tezuka doesn’t say a single word for the next forty minutes.

Echizen coasts a couple sets on his signature shots, as expected. Fudomine’s Ibu is good too, probably better than anyone on the team right now save Fuji, Tezuka, and whatever Echizen shows by the outcome of the match.

Even if they win this, Seigaku has a long way to go before nationals.

Tezuka sees Ibu’s trick with the wrist before anyone else except maybe Fuji and coach. He adds an injury to his mental calculus.

He’s not prepared for the amount of blood on the courts.

Echizen’s freshman entourage is first on the scene. Tezuka watches Echizen swat them back, but the blood is gushing thickly. His shoulders are high and tight with pain.

Everyone else is dumbstruck. Tezuka deals with it. He asks Oishi to get the first-aid kit, lets him do his best with the bandages. Tezuka talks to the umpire, who murmurs something about forced forfeiture if the wound looks bad enough, and Tezuka thinks fiercely _I know what I would want_. Then he checks himself, doesn’t let himself say it unless Echizen does first.

“I want to play,” Echizen says right on cue.

Momo tosses him a racquet and he catches, one-eyed. See? Echizen seems to say. All done. He smirks and plays the obnoxious teen.

Tezuka sees his other hand clench in his shorts. Blood crusts the white knuckles. He makes a decision in an instant. Plucks the racquet out of Oishi’s hand and tells Echizen, “You have ten minutes.”

Echizen grins. It pulls his eyelid and his hand fists tighter in his trousers, but his expression doesn’t waver. “More than enough,” he says, and brings the racquet casually to rest on his shoulder with the other hand.

*

Seigaku wins. Tezuka dreams.

The blood is pulsing out of Echizen’s eye. Tezuka is himself, and he’s Yamato, asking Echizen to take ten minutes, to be a pillar to the team. Echizen, wordless, bleeds. Then all of a sudden he’s Oishi, kneeling before Echizen with a roll of bandages, his hand hovering at the translucent eyelid where alone Echizen is pale. He thumbs the wound and licks. The burst of blood on his tongue is rich and warm and wild like fresh sweat, uni, what he imagined wine was before he sipped it from his father’s cup.

Tezuka washes his own sheets at five in the morning.

*

Echizen becomes one of theirs after that.

Kikumaru adopts him. Oishi frets about him. Inui starts a fresh notebook. Kawamura inquires about his favourite foods. Fuji invents strange and effective ways to tease him. Tezuka even hears something about Kaidoh and Echizen’s cat, airflown with him from New York City.

Tezuka worries it’s a bad idea. What will they do once Echizen goes back home? He brings this up with Ryuuzaki-sensei. She looks at him like he’s crazy.

“You think you can stop teenage boys from making friends?” She says it like he isn’t a teenager too. “Besides, Ryoma’s fourteen. He probably needs the company as much as the team needs him.”

Tezuka leaves the conversation feeling five inches tall and oddly relieved. He hadn’t really wanted sensei to tell him he was right, doesn’t question why.

Tezuka watches Fuji watch Echizen and Momo doze on the way back home on the bus. The low April sun licks their drooling faces. Fuji takes a photo. Tezuka has no such outlet. His ribs are wires, his heart swells too large for his chest.

*

Echizen is one of them now, but he still watches Tezuka with that half-mocking gleam in his eye, calls him “buchou” and all but tips his hat.

All of May, Echizen asks him for a match. Tezuka supposes it’s the novelty of beating the team captain, though he’s pretty sure they’re at least an even match, shoulder or not. Whatever the reason, he keeps ignoring Echizen.

It’s not even that he doesn’t want to. Clearly, they can’t play officially. Not without distracting the team. Unofficially, Tezuka is spending every instant he’s not at the club studying at home where his parents can see him working. It’s juvenile. It keeps his father quiet about the hours he spends on tennis practice, alone or with the team. He’s a teenager even if no one else seems to think he acts like one.

Then he chances on an old profile of Echizen Nanjiroh, Japan’s last tennis ace from before he had teeth. Suddenly Echizen’s play makes too much sense. The tactics, the flashiness, the reckless drive. Tezuka thinks the team has a loose cannon on their hands, that he needs to figure out what makes Echizen tick for all of them.

And for himself.

*

The match confirms what he already knew. Echizen is a good player because he’s light and fast and strong. He’s a brilliant one because he’s quicksilver smart. There’s something behind the eyes on the ball, some ineffable trick of the mind that isn’t anyone else’s, that belongs only to himself, even if he bounces shots that someone taller could seal, empties the powder keg when he should go steady, slow. He imitates but he’s never derivative. Tezuka knows by the end of the third game (2-1) that it’s ridiculous to think Echizen plays tennis for any reason but that he was made to do nothing else.

He doesn’t think about why else he risked his bad left arm to play the boy anyway.

Tezuka wins because he’s taller and broader and two years older. In a year, even a couple months, it’d be hard to call. His shoulder and elbow and whole left arm smart. It’s difficult to tell if it’s a problem since that’s how every part of his body feels at the moment.

“You were holding back,” he says coolly at the end of the last game. It’s his job to criticise. Echizen is one of his now.

“Che. You think I could afford to?” Echizen says between pants. His eyes are large and shining, his cap long swept off his head. All things considered, he doesn’t look all that beat up about losing.

Tezuka looks down instead of replying to rein in the outrageous thud of his heart.

“Ryoma,” Echizen adds out of the blue. “Everyone calls me Ryoma. Since you got to beat me, you might as well.”

Tezuka supposes he could point out that no one does here. Instead he picks up his racquet and walks off the court. Above their heads, a train shudders past. Summer is coming and they don’t have much time.

*

But Tezuka’s back the next week, and the next, and the next. He works around the shoulder by practicing his nitouryuu on Echizen. Echizen doesn’t ask, so he doesn’t have to explain. They make the dust fly on the old Haruno courts.

Tezuka feels like he’s overspending his allowance, eating to excess. His bill must be exponential. For once in his life he can’t stop himself. He shows up at nine a.m. at the courts anyway, his heart beating faster all the way on the train.

“So you want to go to nationals,” Echizen remarks once. His twist serve is easy, nearly conversational. “What about after?”

Tezuka lets his hard cross speak for himself. Echizen huffs, and runs for it.

“Oh, you know what I’m talking about. Wimbledon. The Open. The good stuff.” His smirk is a challenge.

When they’re alone, he talks to Tezuka like he can’t decide if he’s a bully or a friend, says “buchou” like it’s a joke between them.

Tezuka is neither. He’s the first captain in ten years who’ll take Seigaku to the national finals. That’s all.

“Focus on the opponent in front of you,” he says. If we can’t even win nationals, none of us are good for shit, he doesn’t add.

“Yeah, yeah.”

A plane drifts low, large-bellied. It covers the whole court. They crane up to look at the same time as a lob soars up, and Tezuka thinks they can’t possibly be seeing the same thing.

He realises he might not care.

*

Before regionals, Oishi asks to have lunch. They sit at a corner table in the cafeteria where the girls don’t usually see.

He hobbles around the topic for ten minutes before Tezuka says, exasperated, “Is this about the shoulder.”

“Yeah.” Oishi looks relieved.

“It will be fine,” Tezuka says. Somehow things he tries hard enough at work out. It’s almost a moral by now. He hasn’t known it to be otherwise, hopes it will hold.

“Good.” After two years on the same team, Oishi seems to believe him by default. This is the scary part. “How’s Echizen fitting in, dyou think? He seems to like you. Or at least he listens to you.”

Tezuka’s stomach twists. He stabs his grilled fish. “I think he just doesn’t like laps.”

*

Seigaku keeps winning. His shoulder works fine. Father congratulates him, doesn’t say anything about stopping tennis. The other shoe doesn’t drop.

Tezuka relaxes infinitesimally. His Sunday games with Echizen go longer, turn extravagant. Echizen demands a rematch, then a best-of-three, then a full men’s singles tournament match. It feels like they’re gearing up for something else, though Tezuka’s noticed Echizen doesn’t talk about his own tournament prospects, his future plans.

He theorises in the shower that it must be hard, having a father in the same field. Tezuka can sort of relate. It’s the best he can come up with, anyway.

Ryuuzaki-sensei tells Tezuka his game is improving with an indulgent gleam in her eye. Fuji asks if he’s restless about not playing a single tournament match, the scores always settled well before singles one. His smile and shut eyes say he knows everything without looking.

Tezuka figures if Fuji already knows he can do without an answer. He might or might not say this aloud. At which Fuji opens both eyes.

“You’re happy,” he says with incredulous delight, and Tezuka doesn’t confirm or deny it, though he asks himself later if he is, and if it’s a ridiculous selfish thing, to be happy.

*

Echizen hits him a lob. He’s been badgering Tezuka for his real righthand smash. Mosquitoes swirl, lazy, in the air around them, and Echizen looks like he wishes he were holding a fly swat.

Their two-minute-per-week conversation proceeds alongside.

“If you can go so far with tennis, why don’t you?” Tezuka asks. He means because you’re in America, but also because you’re that good. Echizen’s fourteen, about the right age to start thinking, and Tezuka’s sixteen, edging on too old for it. The thought irks him. He forces the ball into his Zone and does a straight volley just to be contrary.

“Che. Speak for yourself.”

Secretly, furtively, Tezuka knows it means more to hear this from Echizen than anybody else. He forgets his original question. To cover for himself, he changes tack, breaks the Zone for a swift cross that actually makes Echizen run. Echizen rolls his eyes and does the drive volley his freshmen fan club dubbed the drive B, and Tezuka loses himself in happy wordless concentration.

“I bet that tastes boring as hell,” Echizen tells him later, panting and dripping before the bench. Tezuka lifts an eyebrow and chugs his thermos, deliberate. His throat bobs. It’s pure ice water. Delicious.

“Bastard,” Echizen huffs. Tezuka shuts his eyes to the sun and idly wonders who taught him to cuss. Surely his parents didn’t, and they don’t cover these things in language class.

The summer sun is full on his back, the trickle of sweat down his neck glorious, the stretch in his knees and thighs and arms sweeter than the cold water in his mouth.

A sharp shoulder bumps his. Their sweaty shirts cling. Tezuka cracks an eye open to Echizen holding out a can of Ponta before him, the gesture inviting, but his expression a little surly, unsure, like he’s never tried this on anyone before.

Tezuka thinks he wants to lick the juice out of Echizen’s mouth, gulp it down with the dark unsavored taste of tongue.

Worse than anything he could have imagined, Echizen’s eyes are full on his face, the admiration blatant, the mouth warm, and Tezuka remembers in an instant that in addition to being a boy, Echizen is _fourteen_. At sixteen, he can’t remember ever being that young. He’s never wanted something that was wrong.

It’s too much. He tried so hard to put this away.

He pushes himself up and says he has to go, watches his shadow fall on Echizen’s upturned face. On his way home he remembers Echizen is to go by August.

*

Echizen’s kneeling before him with a can of drink in his hand. He tilts it to catch the light. The slant of the sun says it’s early June.

Tezuka licks the mouth, which becomes the wound. He opens his eyes and Echizen’s dark eyes gleam back. He bears the expression that doesn’t know how to hide. This part of Echizen is untouched, all trust. Tezuka bites down as hard as he likes, to bleed the wound or to heal it, he doesn’t know. He has never known what it’s like to hurt or take care of anybody, not in his life.

He’s panting when he wakes up. Another dream, another dream.

*

Tezuka doesn’t go to Haruno next Sunday, or the one after.

It’s mid-June. Rays of low sun warm his back. He smashes balls into a concrete wall until his right shoulder starts to feel like his left.

He closes his eyes and sees Echizen’s warm hesitant face, thinks he probably didn’t have many friends at his fancy student-athlete boarding school in New York.

Tezuka doesn’t go back to Haruno the following Sunday, either.

*

In the next weeks Tezuka figures one thing out. Echizen probably wasn’t trying to antagonise him before. Echizen’s actual bad temper is a force of nature. He has no concept of hiding. He stomps. He shirks. He snarks. He drinks enough Ponta to take the enamel off a washbasin. Between drills and matches, he naps aggressively, his knees and elbows out. Tezuka didn’t even know that was possible. Fuji compares Echizen to one of his ailing cacti. Coach worries he’s comatose. Momo worries he’s lovelorn.

“I asked if he was going through a break up,” Momo moans, “and he says, _something like that_. What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

At least the anger seems to be good for his tennis. He takes practice matches with regulars without dropping a point. He experiments with smashes a lot. Still, his attitude is atrocious. Tezuka assigns Echizen the rough number of laps he’s making himself run in his free time. Echizen shows he can run furiously too, the slight limp and judder he picked up from that last match with Yamabuki shoving Tezuka’s heart down the same path whenever he watches.

“Maybe you should talk to him,” Oishi keeps saying at their meetings with coach. “He seems to listen -- ”

“I told you, it’s the laps,” Tezuka says. His tone brooks no argument. Oishi listens to him, and lets it drop, even though Tezuka knows with all his heart that he is _wrong_.

*

They play Hyotei on the last day of June.

It’s the first draw all season where Tezuka is basically guaranteed to get time on the courts. He remembers playing Atobe at senbatsu and the memory makes his blood thrum.

It’s also the third-to-last match Echizen is likely to play with them, even if they make it all the way through to the Kantou finals. Tezuka has been counting down till today in steely anticipation.

“Careful, you’re going to show an expression, Tezuka,” Fuji says after Friday practice.

It was coach who suggested that Echizen sit out. Echizen scowls at the world at large even after she explains the singles dilemma.

“You can’t play doubles,” Tezuka adds after coach is done. It’s more than he would’ve said to anybody else, and the gaffe is blatant to Oishi and Fuji at least, he is sure. But Echizen sulks. He scowls. He misses the point for once, and Tezuka should be relieved, but he only worries harder.

Hyotei is as good as the hype. Tezuka does the math in his head through every match.

In the end, he can’t let his misstep with Echizen cost the team. They’re headed for 2-1 in valid games when he calls Echizen to go with him for warmups.

No time like tournament match point to admit that his shoulder might be up to friendlies with his own team, even Tachibana, but quite possibly not the egomaniac who made the all-Japan team at 15.

He looks at Echizen’s petulant unsmiling face and thinks, Thank god we put you in reserve.

They bat at each other moodily until Echizen suggests a three-point score, and then the old crackle of competitiveness is back and the rhythm is like every game they played since the first one. Tezuka feels himself relax into the motions despite everything else.

“Time,” he calls at last, and Echizen shoulders his racquet without a huff. Tezuka doesn’t say the warmup was for both of them. Echizen doesn’t say a word to Tezuka.

When his shoulder makes a meaty liquid crack twenty points into tie-break, everyone rushes down to the courts except, he thinks, Echizen. In his pain-rent mind he knows this is good, this is fair, since he let Echizen’s split eye bleed all over that other court, didn’t he?

*

Later, as Oishi’s uncle flattens him on the exam table in silent disapproval, Tezuka doesn’t care. His mind is adrift. He sees Echizen’s large-eyed face haloed by the good drugs.

“Hey. Don’t lose now that you’ve beaten me, OK.”

The inherent arrogance in the phrase makes him smirk, loopily. He broke his promise and Echizen hates to lose. But, Tezuka thinks before the good drugs claim him, he doesn’t suppose the game was exactly what Echizen meant.

*

A year or two without competitive tennis. Or: a couple months at a rehab facility, somewhere foreign and expensive and very far from Japan.

Tezuka does the maths in his head and thinks neither is a real option. His father would never agree to let him leave school.

He isn’t sure if there’s a point since he might not be able to play nationals either way.

For the rest of the week the pain and the painkillers form a cocoon of low-level nausea. Practice is out of the question. Meals at home are silent. He can feel his mother fret. He can feel his father brood. It’s in the rice. It sours the kelp and curdles the soup. He wants to jam his chopsticks into his rice bowl, joss stick-style, and shock them into saying something for once instead of just _looking_.

They’re acting like they’re composing his epitaph anyway, he thinks sourly. Then snorts at his rudeness. He’s thinking like Echizen.

Thursday night everyone is hasty to get out of dinner. The door to the other room shuts. He knows they’re talking about him.

After, mother comes to his room. He’s spent an hour pretending to work, spacing out at the imagined tournament schedules he handwrote on the back of his school notebooks.

“Kunimitsu,” she says. The back of her hand rests on his forehead, as though he’s a child with a fever. His heart clenches. “You know we won’t stop you if you’re sure.” Not even father, is what she means.

“But are you sure, Kunimitsu?”

He has no answer.

*

In the days he’s missed practice, Oishi has come to visit with homemade sweets he probably made Kikumaru bake. Fuji has forced him not to eat alone at lunch. Inui has disrupted his study in the library to recite his notebooks of data on Tezuka. He probably means it as reassurance. Even the juniors slipped a get-well card into his locker, the wish written in Kaidoh’s painstaking hand.

There was no signature, no message from Echizen.

Instead of club practice, Tezuka goes to his wall after school. It’s a particularly nice block of concrete, not too low, not too dense. He does some slow swings, fast swings, takes a deep breath and switches into game mode with his right arm. Only when the ball comes hurtling back at him he can’t. It spins on his racquet and he makes to lift, but he’s paralysed. The memory of agony is ambidextrous. The electric shock of a hundred ripped nerves surges through his whole body. The ball bounces into the wall and socks him in the knee. It’s already beginning to swell.

He doesn’t notice. He’s afraid he’ll never be able to play again.

*

The school needs a decision by the end of next week. His parents look at him expectantly. In class, coach keeps dropping by to hand him more brochures. He stares at the spill of colour on his school desk and goes back to his wall, tries to smash out his boiling anxiety but he can’t. That, more than anything, feels like it was taken from him.

By Thursday he’s at his rope’s end. He hasn’t really slept in four days, not since the drugs wore off. He hasn’t been able to hit properly for the same time.

A last resort takes shape in his head. It’s selfish, he thinks, desperately selfish, but not more than anything he’s already done.

*

His appearance at practice stirs the wind, makes whispers. He ignores the lot of them.

“Well?” he says to Echizen, though he didn’t phrase it as question.

A droplet of sweat collects on Echizen’s nose. He tips the cap over his eyes. “You bring the balls.”

*

He doesn’t know what he was expecting. For Echizen to be angry, sure. Even then, he figured a skilled person accustomed to his play was probably still better and gentler than an actual concrete wall.

Tezuka had rules before. If he takes Seigaku to nationals, he can think about going pro after high school. If he can face down whatever it is he fears, look it stern in the eye and conquer, then he deserves to be a tennis player. If not, well. Perhaps the injury’s a timely exit. Either way, he’ll know for sure.

But Echizen comes in questioning. He acts like he’s trying to figure Tezuka out. He doesn’t go slow, exactly, but he’s visibly holding back, low volleys and lobs that land where Tezuka’s arm doesn’t have to snap up, where his shoulder can hold still. The control is easy for Echizen. The pace is effortless. Dimly, Tezuka admires the wordless ability, the unshowy liquid movements that make the racquet part of Echizen’s body in a way that helps Tezuka’s arm relearn its movements without pain.

By the fifth game of this, he’s also furious. “Stop messing around,” he yells across the net. Another geriatric crosscourt ball. 30-15 to the cripple.

Echizen stands up straight. His grin is knife-sharp as he tosses his racquet to his other hand.

“Think you can hold the Zone against my right?” he asks. Tezuka recalculates. Echizen’s less dominant arm has more power, less control. It means the spin won’t be predictable. Tezuka actually has no idea, never meant to show this weakness to anyone.

It dawns on him that he’s been played, and also, that he doesn’t give a crap. He feels a slow disbelieving laugh rise up in him like soda fizz.

For the rest of the match, Echizen trains him out of his new fear and he trains Echizen to beat his trump card. On game seven of ten, Echizen mutters something at him. “What?” he asks. He really couldn’t hear. Echizen scowls like it was on purpose, mumbles a little louder.

“I _said_ , you still free Sundays?”

“My shoulder’s bust.”

Echizen looks at him like he’s stupid. “Yeah, but we always played with your right, no?”

He says it like it’s something that belongs to both of them, that no injury can take.

“Yeah,” Tezuka says. Something burns in his eyes and he blinks. The July sun is relentless. For the first time in what seems like years, the ache of tennis suffuses him, fills his muscles and stretches whole through him. He feels sure.

*

There’s an envelope on Tezuka’s desk at home. It’s filled, stamped, missing only the seal. Once he mails it in, the faster he goes, the better. He might be back in time for the first round of nationals. He’ll likely leave before Echizen does. No more Haruno Sundays after all.

Lots of people to tell, make-up lessons to arrange and the team to assuage. But Tezuka knows who he needs to know first.

He looks up the temporary cell number in his phone. Echizen, it still says simply. He takes a breath and dials. Echizen picks up on the second ring. They agree to meet on the roof -- it’s something that should be said in person, Tezuka knows.

Echizen is already slouched against the low wall when Tezuka gets there. His cap hides his eyes; he affects nonchalance, is restless.

It only takes a couple sentences to explain. “I thought you ought to know,” he says when he’s done.

Echizen pauses for a while. The low toll of the school bell is portentous. “But why?” he says at last, looking up straight at Tezuka. His eyebrows knit in confusion. He sounds very young, his voice child-high. “I won't even be here for nationals.”

There’s a second in which mindless blind hurt passes through Tezuka’s body. When he speaks it’s like trying to spit out blood. He’s never cared for the touchy-feely things other people say, doesn’t know how to start now.

“You seen Iron Man?” he asks instead. It’s the first American-seeming movie he can think of.

“N-o,” Echizen says. His eyebrows go up and slant down again. He frowns, then settles. His mouth makes a small warm notch in his cheek.

Tezuka is turned out of his own mind, stupid with feeling.

*

They end up at a park near the cinema. It’s the sort of place his parents wouldn’t let him go himself after sunset. Tezuka doesn’t care. The dark is confessional. Streetlights peer over graffitied benches like curious eyes. Their light is orange-gold, Ryoma-like.

Echizen is still pissed off about Iron Man. “Doesn’t he remind you of Atobe, buchou?”

Tezuka chuffs and admits that yes, he does. He doesn’t know how to say that Echizen’s knee-jerk dislike for Atobe moves him.

“Also, Stark’s stupid. He thinks he’s so smart but he can’t do anything else anyway.”

Echizen’s arms are still crossed casually behind his back, but Tezuka thinks  _ touche _ . He wants to tell Echizen he thinks he can do anything, in tennis or otherwise, here or in America. His blind sincere faith shakes him, makes him shy. He thinks with a pang that he doesn’t know anything about Echizen’s life at home, not really.  

Instead he tells Echizen about the umbrellaed drink Atobe tried to foist on him at last year’s senbatsu with much fanfare and waggling of brows.

“It was a mocktail,” he concludes. Echizen chuckles. It’s low and warm. The night is humid and there’s no reason for Echizen to be standing quite so close, their hips bumping, their pocketed hands in a second-order hold.

“Hey.” Echizen’s stopped. Behind a knot of trees is a tennis court. The net is half-torn but the floodlights bathe the clay. 

Tezuka glances down at Echizen. They just showered after practice. By the time he goes home, mother will have let out the bathwater. This makes no sense.

They end up on the court anyway. They don’t play to win. Tezuka’s too raw from the last week. Echizen meets him at his pace. He’s an adept mimic. He plays tennis with comic timing. He gets Kikumaru’s beam, and his gaudy flourish. Oishi’s moon volley, Fuji’s Hakugei, Kawamura’s burning serve, Inui’s neat backhand volley, Kaidoh’s boomerang, Momo’s smash, transposed six inches lower. Echizen’s been watching. Tezuka should’ve known. He could never doubt now that Echizen is one of them.

“Buchou,” Echizen says out of the blue. _This one’s for you._ Tezuka stares in shock. Gets a barrage of his own moves directed at him, Echizen with his shorter skinnier arm powering through the zero shiki, Zone, phantom, driving it home in Tezuka’s court, the joy implicit. Echizen is beautifully transparent in this as he is in his anger, his hurt, his rare fragile shyness.

This time Tezuka ends up on his knees in the forecourt. It’s mostly from trying to pant and not-laugh at the same time. He can hardly remember the score. Echizen looks down at him for once. In the floodlights, his eyes gleam black and sure. He walks up and steps over the scruffy net, needing to hop a little. Tezuka’s heart wrenches. His throat is thick. Sweat slides over his eyes, burns.

“Hey, hey,” Echizen is saying. He’s come to kneel before him. Tezuka never knew that hoarse rich voice could go so low, so soft. “Don’t be that way. Buchou don’t.” He crouches even lower, meets Tezuka nose to nose. Then his head is on Tezuka’s knee, his neck at Tezuka’s shin, his cheek on Tezuka’s thigh. His sweaty warmth sings.

Tezuka flexes his muscles beneath his shorts. His thigh is three months’ worth of strength training gone to waste, but if he moved now he could still knee Echizen in the throat or eye where it might never heal. Echizen’s pulse hammers rabbitquick below his skin.

“Ryoma,” he says at last. Ryoma’s mouth moves. “Ryoma.” His fingers nest in the thick damp hair, cups the round of the skull where his mind sits, traces over the eyelid that ripped and tore and he didn’t, couldn’t soothe. Ryoma blinks and looks up, his eyes liquid and seeing. If Tezuka touched Ryoma’s eye now, he might feel a scar. If he licked, Ryoma’s fingers might taste of popcorn salt. Tezuka doesn’t. He breathes with Ryoma in his hold.

If only winning was anything like this.


End file.
